This garbage about an approximate equivalence between believing in God and believing in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny is hardly original to Dawkins -- who, apart from his idea of religion being a "meme" that we "catch" like a virus, hasn't had an original thought about religion in his life.
I could show examples of this from early in the 20th century, though I'd have to dig through a bunch of notes to find them and I won't bother. Around 1998, I had an exchange with Phil Johnson about methodological naturalism, in which he also implicitly equated my belief in God with belief in Santa Claus, since I wasn't persuaded by his assault on naturalism.
God and Santa Claus are not close equivalents. Period. That's what I said to Johnson, and what I'd tell Dawkins -- as if he would be listening.
On the other hand, I think we can be confident that God is left-handed (the fact that I am also is, I assure you, independent of this conclusion) and is almost certainly a fan of the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs. (That's one reason why the Cubs didn't get to the World Series in one of the recent years when the Saux did -- God wouldn't have known what to do. Thus, in one memorable instance, God intervened through the glove of a fan near the foul line in Wrigley Field. This relates to theodicy as well, but I'll leave that out for now.)
Ted
To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Tue Aug 25 17:27:34 2009
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Tue Aug 25 2009 - 17:27:34 EDT